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We're goin to Hell I ... I'm watchin the Giants/Diamondbacks game (Johnson against Cain, 2-2 in the 5th), and Kruk and Kuip (that Kroook and Kipe) focus in on this big dude in a blue shirt who is eating a caramel apple covered in M&Ms. It's a little hard to see in the pic, but that is exactly what it is. Kuip notes that the guy is chewing so hard you'd think he was going to the electric chair. An M&M covered caramel apple. Have we no shame?

We're goin to Hell II ... we ordered a box of ordinary bandaid strips at work. They arrived via special delivery in enough packaging to bury a small village. This happens all the time. Why couldn't they just slap a label on the bandaid box and pop it in the mail? The packaging is worth more than the product. Are we all asleep at the switch? Is no one paying attention? Why do we continue to operate this way as if nothing has changed? I watched a fellow worker today clean his teeth in the restroom ... and he let the water run continuously. We're in an incipient drought here. (I'll address the idiocy of bottled water on another occasion.)

We're goin to Hell III ... MoveOn.org blew it big time with their foolish, tail-ending campaign to reduce gasoline prices with a lot of verbiage about big oil mega profits. Gasoline prices must go UP ... they need to double, triple. The correct progressive demand is that oil companies spend 80% of their profits on R&D for carbon-neutral energy ... and if they don't want to do that, their profits should be taxed at a rate of 80% and the government should spend that money on carbon neutral energy. But, just like the Congressional Dems, MoveOn fell for the rank populist notion that cheap gas is part of the patrimony, some sort of working class right. No, it is not. Cheap gas is the problem.

Top photo by Arod, from my TV. Middle photo by Arod. Bottom photo: MoveOn.Org

Cleaning the Basement: A Packrat's Conundrum

I spent Saturday afternoon with my darling ex, as I call him, cleaning the garage. This is an activity that we have shared since 1993, an endless task that proceeds but does not culminate. Since we broke up in 2003, the cleaning has been more sporadic but more conclusive given that fonts of influx no longer flow. Still, we managed to accumulate a lot of indispensable treasure not only in 10 years together, but in decades before and what will becomes decades after.

The non-packrats, of course, enjoy the ritual of ridiculing those of us who cling to stuff ... stuff not as any concrete thing, but stuff as the abstraction that represents all the things that fit within the set of what a packrat might accumulate. So "Stuff" rather than stuff. And the packrats play along with the non-packrats, all the while smugly clinging to the notion that we will have the one thing that is needed when the others cannot find it. Of course, the advent of cheap Chinese-made stuff and the insatiable-consumer society means that whatever little treasure we have stored faithfully, and probably could not find if we needed it, is available entombed in a heavy plastic blister pack buried in a couple of further layers of packaging for 99 cents, or 5.99, or 14.99, or whatever at the local MegaMart.

A pox on MegaMart.

RB, the aforementioned darling ex, and I accumulated a large treasure trove of lights. RB is a lighting designer, and at one point we sponsored legendary Halloween parties. No ghoulish detail was too small to ignore, and no disgusting display was too obscure to receive the precisely perfect lighting. So each of our basement cleanup jags has been concerned to some great degree with processing the assorted lighting devices ... and more importantly the would-be lighting devices to which we are clinging in the earnest if objectively vain hope that one day we will use them, or one day RB will make them usable.

We have been apart, if still joined at the hip, for four years now ... wow, seems strange to write that. No friend of mine will be surprised to hear that I am as much in love with him as I have ever been, but RB and I are fully agreed that our lives and our friendship have been vastly well served by separating. So we can hang out, and clean the basement, with vastly less rancor or apocalyptic meaning than ever before. When we were together, throwing something out felt like an abortion ... I use the term lightly ... like a lost opportunity for life together. Now throwing things out together feels like a relief, like we can let go of the crap so we can get the hell outta here and go get tacos together. (In fact, we waited just a little too long for the tacos, and by reason of lack of food I got a little bitchy in response to an RB former-wifely bit of what I call Heloise Helpful Household Hints ... but that passed as soon as the taco settled down in front of me.)

But the epic moment in this cleanup was the cabinet/buffet. We threw out this and that, processed this and that, stuffed some treasures into the back of the '86 Honda Civic that I drive and which I call Merc after the Mercury space capsule, to take to Community Thrift. But there was no way to work around that bloody cabinet/buffet that I have failed to move on Craigslist. I put up yet another ad, this time for free, while we worked, and by the end of our hours together, I had more than a few bites. Over the months I have tried to dump this treasure, I got no bites at $30, so I raised the price to $50 and got a few false leads, then lowered it again and got more "yeah, I definitely want it, but I am never going to contact you again" crap.

Well, to make a long story short, I have finally given it away. It is a lovely piece ... or was a lovely piece as far as I am concerned ... and it served me well and it was part of the Kurt patrimony (and I will leave that to another post) about which I am sentimental and nationalistic. But it no longer fit in my life, and it has been consigned to the garage for four years now. This lady, Lynn, who is a nanny-on-demand, and who definitely grokked my mojo, answered my ad, stuck to it with me through a couple of false starts, and brought her son and mega-SUV which swallowed the thing like a whale and Jonah. We had a chat about packrats ... she has an aunt who collected tissues ... the problem with collecting is not the obsessive compulsiveness, but rather what you are obsessive-compulsive about. If you read this, Lynn, I enjoyed meeting you and I am happy you have my cabinet. I am sure Kurt would be happy too.

But I still feel the pain of its loss ... as I do with every single tschotschke that ever leaves my grasp.

Being a packrat means a life of loss and giving up, even as you steadily accumulate.

Walkin with Loki

Saturday: Still so disgusted at the yeller paint job on the Hebrew Free Loan Association that I changed my normal Saturday morning walk. For a couple of years, Loki and I have headed down Market, across Franklin or the new Octavia Boulevard, then up Hayes or Grove and back home via any number of routes depending upon how much time we have.

So starting this weekend, we're going to go West, wander through the Haight and walk back through the Panhandle, all long ago home to the Summer of Love. The Haight is definitely best in the early morning before the madding crowds of lookie loos and the incessant circling for parking. No neighborhood better illustrates the destructive impact of the monster car counter-revolution than a place like the Haight. SUV driving has caused a marked deterioration in driving skill in general ... people wander all over the place, make left turns like one-eyed drunks, crowd the center stripe, blow through stop signs like they're not there. It has to do with the self-absorption of bloodless cynical empty consumption combined with most people driving vehicles that are just plain too big for either their limited attention span or their driving skills. Cranky. I plan to wax more cranky on this subject again later.

It has been cool and dank, which is the way I like it. Only a few hardy drunks and speeders and generalized homeless on Haight itself. Loki doesn't like the homeless ... I figure they must smell different because my last dog, the red husky Den, also didn't like homeless people. I keep him on a tight leash when they're around.

Found an old mural from the 70s, The Spirit of Youth, on some sort of youthie community center ... they have a lot of community in the Haight, after all. Faded mural, but a couple of the figures struck me as exuding unselfconscious sexiness. I guess as an old fag from the 70s who revelled in the unselfconsciousness of the sexiness of men of the time, this litle faded mural pulled me back in time. I enjoyed the 80s and 90s movement of men into the mainstream of sexiness, and I argue that this has a lot to do with the consciousness that gay liberation commanded, but some nagging sense worries me that we let the secret out of the bag.



Had a bagel in this place once a few months back, and the cream cheese was kinda crappy and cheap. San Francisco abounds in little places like this, but this one never seems very crowded. Just after I took this pic, some young guy came along and sat outside ... he watched me with a look of disinterest as I photographed sundry street art. I wanted to shoot him, but my little belt camera has insufficient telephoto capabilities for candid human shots. This would not have been terribly candid, at any rate.


Stood in the middle of an empty Haight to take a shot of an old bar ... cop drives up slow on me, but lets me do my thing, perhaps because I was pretty efficient about it. I shoot all these photos with a big dog on a rope tied to my left hand, so it is a bit of a balancing act. Loki is reasonably patient but he does get to tugging. I wonder who drinks in this place ... I figure it could be a bar in Phillie or Kansas City. It's up toward the end of Haight, near Stanyan, where the funk of the street runs out quick. At Stanyan, which is where Haight Street ends and Golden Gate Park begins, there is an ill-conceived MacDonalds (where were the NIMBY protesters when we needed them), a boarded up grocery store that is supposed to become a Real Foods, an abandoned bowling alley. There used to be a homeless encampment, but the city finally cleaned them out ... or leastwise moved them a couple of blocks north as best as I can tell.

Sunday: We took the Fisherman's Wharf, North Beach walk that I wrote about when on my first real blog post, but this time took about three hours to do as we dilly-dallied here and there. Again, a nice cool slightly moist day, not too many people about.


I let Loki have a look at the seals at Pier 39 (or some such number ... I'll have to check it out.) Loki, naturally, was inordinately interested, but did manage to suppress any barking. He strangely gets spooked by the bison in Golden Gate Park, but he could not take his eyes off this caviling herd. Amidst the squabbling, certain of their members sleep in utter peace. We are not privy to the particulars of why some sleep, some squabble, and some get shoved back into the water.

We rambled around the waterfront, and over Vallejo again. It appears that they are going to close Vallejo between Columbus and Grant to make room for a pedestrian mall fronting the new national shrine to Saint Francis of Assisi, patron saint of our fair city. I am in favor of pretty much any pedestrian mall, but it amusing to realize that the sanctimonious fathers and mothers of the onetruechurch will be smugly clapping themselves on the back while all the aging beatniks and anarchoids and atheists and philosophes of the venerable Caffe Trieste, directly across the mall, will have even more room to stretch out their indolent limbs.


Loki and I took refuge at the Caffe Puccini ... I never have enough time to wait in the line at the Trieste given that the dog has to wait unhappily outside. We had ... leastwise I had the vast majority of ... a lox bagel and a macchiato. Even here in little Italy, the macchiato is what a cappuccino would have been only a decade or so ago. Everything is bigger now .... the cars, the waistlines, the egos, and the coffee drinks.

Photos by Arod

Lindsay Lohan as The Antichrist

Somehow I had never heard of the San Francisco Chronicle blogger Mark Morford until the professional hate monger Jerry Falwell died when Morford wrote a much admired piece on the bigot. Now I read him all the time ... he's a sharp and witty writer with depth notwithstanding the withering observances. He has a hilarious piece on the forgettable Lindsay Lohan as the Antichrist that is well worth a read.

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Worked from home today so I could run a couple of weekday errands ... actually got a lot done ... when you work from home, you may not work every moment of the day, but you gain back all that kibbitzing time that is a part of office life. I like it both ways, the frenetic office and the serene home. But today ended up being exemplary so perhaps I can repeat the experiment a little more often.

Guilty pleasure ... I took myself to a Jack in the Box on Bayshore today and had their sirloin burger. I feel bad, like I broke a promise. Enjoyed the burger though. Four nurses, or so it seemed, lined up for their fast food. One giggles, "I wonder what it would taste like if I mixed half diet and half regular soda." Wow, what a low threshhold for excitement! ... I was out on the Bayshore because errand two was to run some toxic waste (paint thinner type stuff) to the recycling depot. But the line up out there was blocks long with big, full pickup trucks. No way.

Web 2.0 neo-dot-commer ... so I ended up in Ritual Grounds on Valencia, the coolest place in San Francisco ... which is pretty damned cool considering how cool we all are here ... we get cool points for just knowing where Ritual Grounds is ... I took my new laptop there to start on a humorous presentation that a colleague and I will will make when our big boss retires in a few weeks ... the place is so cool that everyone moves through the line for coffee at a glacial pace ... somehow cool means that you can take five minutes to pick out a muffin even if there are 20 people behind you stretching out into the street ... nobody seems to mind, though, except me, but I am pushy s.o.b. who hates it when other people waste my time obliviously ... maybe I'm not so cool after all ... still, had a nice time pretending to be a web 2.0 type. Tried to find a Google Street View of the place, but for some strange reason they skipped Valencia Street ... are they crazy?


Valencia Street ... when I first moved to San Francisco in 1981, Valencia Street was pretty much just the Mission, small industry, very Hispanic. We used to go to La Rondalla, a kooky Mexican restaurant with ultra-tacky, year-round Christmas decorations. It's still there, at 20th if memory serves me, but I haven't been there in years. In the early 80s, a lot of women's businesses, especially lesbian-oriented outfits like bars and bookstores, set up shop on Valencia, and even though it is only a block from Mission Street, the area quickly became another neighborhood. I think it was in 1981 that some gay lib guys led by Ron Lanza set up a performance venue near 18th Street in a former funeral home that had famously processed a lot of Vietnam dead. It was called the Valencia Rose. They painted the place pink and presented all manner of cutting edge gay performance. (SF gay history buffs should definitely check out the link; and if you knew Donald Montwill, there are several photos that depict him in full flood that you must see: what a man; so sad that he is gone.) It is now part of New College. The dot com era completely rewrote the area, especially betwen 20th and 24th where there is a hideous modernistical church called Bethel ... really a monstrosity that a reasonable city planning department would have driven out to the 'burbs where it belongs. After the dot-commers fled one night while no one was looking, their replacements, the web 2.0 types, moved in with their ratty clothes, lack of shaving equipment, slouching gait, and their array of electronics. I don't really mind 'em ... some of the guys are kinda hot if you look past the billowing sack-cloth that they voluntarily choose to dress in. My darling ex, RB, lives across the street from Ritual Grounds, so I always feel his warmth when I am there.

Click on the photo for a slide show of images I have made on Valencia Street or nearby.

Gone gone gone ... so the Giants dumped Benitez at last. Great day. As I write this, we are leading the Philllies 13-0 in the bottom of the ninth with this Messenger guy, who we got for Benitez, pitching. We're so happy he's gone that we paid $4.7 million to get rid of him. Sabean (the general manager) was real pissy though in the Chronicle this morning: "The type of person or professional I am, I don't take any satisfaction in anybody's demise or inability to do his job," Sabean said. "I'll say one thing about Armando. He was strong enough to be a whipping boy. The first game here (in New York) we had three players who were not available. That was not Armando's fault. Tonight we had three hits and looked dead as a doornail. That was not Armando's fault. We are at a crossroads in my mind, and apparently the fans, the press and some people in the clubhouse felt he needed to go. Now we're going to find out what they're made of. We'll see who's strong enough to be the whipping boy now. ... We're going to find out who, when and how we're going to step up. Right now, as we speak, we're heading closer to last place than first place. I don't know that that was Armando Benitez's fault." I guess Sabean figures he will be the whipping boy. That would be a pity.

Photo by Arod.

Planet of the Apes and Religion and Rulership

Beware the beast man, for he is the devil's pawn. Alone among God's primates, he kills for sport, or lust or greed. Yes, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him. Drive him back into his jungle lair: For he is the harbinger of death. (23rd Scroll, 9th Verse)

Religion is always about power, whether the power to control and compel one's followers or the power to exclude the anathematized. It is a pity that we do not have more of the Ape Scrolls (quoted above) to play with, but this quote is good enough for a starting point. The psychology of religious political control is based on a dialectic of fear and submission. The sociology is based on the degree of force, whether armed force or the force of ideology as transmitted through social control, that religion can bring to bear upon rulership. As I tried to argue in my post about Gellner's take on the relations between Islamic piety and rulership, the Muslim relationship with power took place over a long stretch of history largely as an overt negotiation between an almost voluntarily subject pious urban population and a resident and tolerated "horseman" rulership.

The western Christian relationship between religion and rule is founded upon a long stretch of centuries in which the church was the centrifugal force, and rulership was a fractured centripetal force. Kingship did not arise instantly from the horsemen who drip by drip supplanted the Roman elites ... merging in some cases, dominating in others, and dropping almost instantaneously from historical view in yet others. Charlemagne stands out among the early definers of kingship, but even his famous coronation on Christmas Day, 800, was as much an attempt at episcopal usurpation for the purposes of the church as it was some sort of proto-constitutional establishment of the notion of divinely authorized kingship.

Even then, it was not until the 11th and 12th centuries that the church and the state settled into the pitched battles and fevered entanglements that set Europe on the path to its eventual liberation from the church ... a liberation that took another seven or eight hundred years to accomplish. What allowed western Europe to accomplish this was founded in the earliest moments of that relationship ... specifically, that the church had to confront rule as an alien force and not as a natural ally. It is exclusively in this sense that Christianity has a greater idea of the separation of church and state than Islam ... this idea is not in the theology but in the circumstances of the founding of modern Europe through the invasions of the horsemen at the expense of the Roman empire. Remember, theology is bunk, but religious history tells a tale that no one can sensibly ignore. Theology tail-ends events.

The proof of this paradigm is in the relative slavishness to power that one finds historically in the eastern church which was never free of the empire. Constantine dictated to the eastern chruch and this was a pattern that continued notwithstanding the various fights (for Arianism, for Monophysitism, against iconoclasm). The Byzantine church was an arm of the state. The western church sought to make the state an arm of the church, and in the event provided the venue in which the state eventually became independent of it.

That's my overview. It was not my intention in starting to write this blog that I would focus primarily on religious historical issues, notwithstanding that I have been reading almost exclusively for a year about the Middle Ages and in particular about the rise of Christianity. But having gone down this path, I thought it useful if only to me that I should put down the general lines of my arugment, and this is it. We shall see when I get back to it.

In the meanwhile, let's return to Planet of the Apes, a society in which church and state are fused. It is in that sense a fascist society, and that is the affect which the auteurs, if I might, used to inure the audience against its conceits. As much as rationalists rightly fear theocracy, we are not actually threatened by it at the moment in a Planet of the Apes type scenario, and the experience of the dubyaite cabal with the religious, and the speed with which it turned into bile, should frankly give us some comfort notwithstanding the hideous damage they have done. It is not that the bastards don't want to wrap us in a medieval cowl, it is that they still cannot notwithstanding that they are at their most dominant in a century. The religious have the upper hand in Planet of the Apes because they have a monopoly on the manipulation of fear, and it turns out to be an ancient fear that is well-founded. After all, Moses/Taylor/Heston ends the film wailing in the surf that human beings actually had destroyed themselves, and this "as-if" provided after the fact justification for the religious domination of rule in the society from which he is fleeing. The gift of this film, though, is that in the end we sympathize neither with the religious authoritiarianism nor with the rebel who is revealed as standing on sand.

Perhaps that is where we are now in society, recoiling at the religious madness but unable to find a hero.

Photo by Arod, Notre Dâme de Paris; click on the photo to go my Paris slideshow.

Balkin’ Bob and Benitez

The terminally .500 Giants hit a new low right after flirting with a new high last night. Lincecum pitched another gem, the bullpen hung on by its fingernails (Ortiz walked two and hit one to load the bases and then squeezed out of it), until Vizquel scratched out a run in the top of the 12th.

Then Benitez gets the ball. He walked Jose Reyes, then balked him to second. And after Reyes was sacrificed to third, Benitez balked him home. Then he gave up a massive home run to Carlos Delgado. Giants lose.

The balk is arguably the most baseball of baseball items. It amounts to the pitcher attempting to deceive the runner in order to induce him to steal inpropitiously. There are a couple of ways to balk ... starting and then stopping your motion or not coming to a full stop before starting the pitch ... but you never really expect it as a fan. When a balk is called, all the runners advance one base, even if that base is home plate. I predicted a balk once at Candlestick, the Giants’ old park, and got kudos from some kid next to me when I was right ... sports fans love calling a shot, and never forget the glee.

The first base umpire was Bob Davidson, famously known as balkin’ Bob for his penchant for calling the balk. The third base umpire was Hunter Wendelstadt, son of the famous umpire Harry Wendelstadt. He called his balk after the tiniest but totally obvious flinch from Benitez who got suckered by the prancing Reyes ... and he called the balk with authority and pizzazz, no doubt about it. It might be an inadvertent flinch, it might not mean anything, it could not conceivably have fooled the runner who was in fact fooling the pitcher (who is a fool, IMHO), but in baseball the umpires are fanatically committed to the integrity of the game.

It is not thus in basketball, whose referees are professionally corrupted by their open awe of stardom, or in football which, to paraphrase George Will, is refereed by a committee of idiots punctuated by blindness. Basketball referees lightly oversee a game that has, at least on the pro level, became a slugfest. There is open talk about how veterans and stars “establish their moves” ... that means they get away with traveling because they have done it so many times.

Not in baseball. The umpires are deeply integrated into the game which they defend as a point of honor. My fantasy sports job ... in the sense of the lie that “you can be anything you want if you only try try try hard enough” ... is major league umpire.

That said, balkin Bob got a little excited at first and probably figured it was a balk because Benitez is such a moron.

First pic is Benitez appealing to the clouds for some sympathy (he gets none down here on earth). The pic below is Lincecum whose crazy journey is too sweet for words right now.

Rambling

Not sure what to write about tonight. I want to close off the religion and power in Planet of the Apes thread, but not sure if I have it in me tonight. Perhaps that reluctance is because it is hard to have gone back to work after a three-day weekend ... weekends are the time when the working classes pretend to be who they really are, and that extra day is just enough to dupe you into thinking you are who you pretend to be rather than who you must be to make ends meet. Identity, such a sweet slice of false consciousness. I am not who I pretend to be, but that does not mean that I am not, nor that I may not pretend.

I am very lucky in my job at MRU because it is a job that uses all of my native and developed skills — technical, electronic, print-production, web, and academic. And I genuinely appreciate the fact that my job contributes to education and intellectual development as well as to my sustenance. But, man, I would rather do it all in my PJs at home, and I would rather that it involved a lot more of the cerebral and a lot less of the social. Am I an incipient hermit or what!

Got back to work today to confront a big print deadline on Thursday. We had a few glitches, but I make all my deadlines, "religiously" as it were. Deadlines do not make for easy lunch hours of writing on the new laptop in the sun. So, instead, I ramble a little in bed, listening to the tail end of Keith Olbermann's nightly ramble ... he's on about poor Lindsay Lohan right now. I have no idea who Lindsay Lohan is, and I think I will keep it that way. I just wonder why she does not use some part of her ill-deserved millions to hire a driver!

I got to watching a documentary on Jacques Derrida last night ... I will ramble on about that at greater length later. I decided to write down random phrases as they appealed to me. Derrida is a victim of his own press ... he is actually quite an erudite literary critic, in my view, but he wandered aimlessly into the juggernaut of the American academic literary market. He comes across in the documentary as a little uneasy at being the object of attention. At one point he refuses to "naturalize that which is not natural", i.e., the camera which is pointing at him. Nice phrase, and well applied to any number of situations.

Perhaps it is well applied to work. My friend Michael Merrill, deceased since 1989, used to say that men are sexiest when they are at work. Michael was that unqiue being, the Buddhist Marxist ... perhaps paradoxically a more unique form of being had he survived than it was in the 70s from which we emerged or the 80s in which we endured ... again, a subject that deserves more attention anon. For now, Michael's notion of the sexiness of a man at work derives precisely from the awkwardness of the "unnaturality" of work. It is not that doing stuff for economic or survival reasons is unnatural ... quite the contrary. But work is removed at least one degree of separation from that in modern life, and it is unnatural because it always requires that we confront it as not in our nature. (With reference to the other half of that dialectic, sexiness is always an awkward confrontation ... there is something unnerving about the sexy, and each person has his or her own take on that awkwardness. Perhaps in a reductive sense that is why religion hates sexiness so much ... because the awkwardness is a counterpoise to the sure predatory character of scripture to which we are required to surrender innocently as if we do not see the potency of the awkward, the unscripted, the bawdy/body. The "earnest" religious swallow this whole; the "desperate" religious feel the contradiction, but come down on the wrong side at least in ideation if not in practice; the "cynical" religious see it all and take what they want, each to their own.)

Work in the sense above is subject to the "any force given long enough turns into its opposite" rule. The unnaturality of work is not immediate (unmediated) or even apparent. Now, it would be simplistic to equate the unmediated with the natural because it is in the nature of being human to be mediated. So working to, say, survive may be natural, but work is a mediation which escapes our control and so progressively retreats from the natural to the mediated ... the mediation is external and steadily more subject to external forces that we accept "as if" natural, and incorporate, but which are absurd and irremediable when we try to quantify them up close or isolate them or identify with them.

So, in Michael's sense, the sexiness of a man at work is congruent with the absurdity of performing "as if" naturally but in fact awkardly. The observer is jarred by reason of the distance from a "natural" that is imagined and idealized but never realized.

Will I regret this in the morning? Probably. Photo at the top (by our mutual friend IM) is of Michael who would have enjoyed this ramble if only because it provides so many opportunities for debate and for its B-S-iness.

Walkin with Loki

Another weird walk on Sunday. Somehow, I forgot about Carnaval and a street that is normally pretty empty on Sunday morning was teeming with people. We cut across Valencia as we often do anyway on this route, and then there was this photo op in a parking lot. So I leapt over the chain, and dog followed, and just as I pulled out my little Canon Elph, Loki jumped at some pigeons ... the camera flew out in an arc 10 feet high, and landed kerplunk ... damage minimal, but the aperture no longer functions. That little camera is two years old, and it changed my life, and it was just by luck the last purchase for which I bought a full warranty. So I can get it fixed for free, but I need a camera. I ended up buying the current model (a Canon Powershot SD 750), and I promised Mother that she can have the old one once it gets back from the hospital.

Sheesh, that's two walks in a row with unfortunate moments. I get a new camera out of the deal (well, I get to pay for it too).

Today (Memorial Day), we went to Land's End. I tried out the new camera, shooting shots I've shot many times before. After many tries, I finally had the opportunity to photograph the remains of the Sutro Baths with no other human beings around because we were so early. A madness of pelicans flying overhead .. we stopped in awe ... perhaps Loki had designs on them I would rather not quantify, but I was mightily impressed.

On the way back, we detoured and found ourselves in the middle of the golf course ... legal path, but that did not prevent the Japanese speaking golfers from giving us the withering look. I wouldn't mind golfers so much if their sport was not so environmentally destructive ... why not get back to the Scottish way and let the fairways go fallow.

Anyway, a nice walk, very relaxing.

Flux and Reflux: Planet of the Apes

I am still so pissed off about the paint job on the Hebrew Free Loan Association (see my immediately previous post); it is so galling when tiny minds or smug committees pollute the landscape with their witlessness. While I wrote that post, I flipped on the TV and managed to stumble on to The Planet of the Apes. Now, I am not much of a movie buff, though Netflix is allowing me to catch up (also killed some time today watching the hilarious A Shot in the Dark, the second Pink Panther movie), but for whatever reason, I have seen Planet of the Apes 4 or 5 times over the years.

This is a film thematically centered the relationship between religion and rule, often fought ought in a battle between faith and science. It is certainly curious of course that a bare-chested Charlton Heston represents the rebel for science and against faith. It struck me that the scene on the beach relates to my posts on flux and reflux in religion, and for that matter on the relationship between religions and rule that I wrote about in rehashing Constantine.

Dr. Zaius, who is a Jerry Falwell like cynical religious leader throughout most of the film, abruptly turns into a rather nuanced character on the beach. It starts when he says, "There is no contradiction between faith and science ... true science." This is a set-up line that played to rationalist sensibilities rising in public thinking in the 60s because what Zaius actually means is that true science is dictated by faith, not the other way around. So the audience was likely to see this as cynicism. Taylor (Heston) has no space for faith ... what he wants is a rifle and a horse (there are those damned horses again) and a shot at surviving by dint of brains and the quotidien application of reason to problems. Isn't it the more curious how that line about faith and science reads so differently in the present religious revanchism ... now true science is true faith, and butter does not melt in the mouths of those, be they the ludicrous creationists or the craven scientific apologists for religion, who claim that there is no contradiction between faith and reason. Nonsense.

But, as I say, this is a set-up line in the movie for a consideration of the role of religion. Remember that Zaius is the villain, and yet he argues that religion alone can prevent people (or apes, as it were) from enacting their worst instincts ... that without religion's deliberate suppression of knowledge, the worst instincts would come to the fore. Again, it is Moses ... I mean Charlton ... who snorts at this argument, only to learn the truth of it when he finds the shattered Statue of Liberty in the sands shortly thereafter. So the flux and reflux in the scene ... between Zaius as villain and Zaius as prophet ... mirrors the flux and reflux in the world between resurgent reason and the flight into faith.

Zaius ends up looking rather better than one might have expected as he threatens people with trials for heresy. I had to snort when the penalty was determined to be two years ... real religious history finds that the penalty for heresy is typically a horrible death or exile. Zaius's rehabilitation, however, stems from one of the most noxious of the religious claims ... not that they alone have truth, but that they alone have morality and depth of insight ... a brash rebel like Taylor cannot see that the fat establishment is protecting him when it denies him his freedom. So in his moment of subtlty, Zaius actually shows that he has harnessed his insights to repression and authoritarianism. That's theology for ya.

I'll try to come back to the question of religion and rule after I walk the dog.

An Architectural Desecration

Unhappy walk today ... didn't start out that way. Some young female twit blew a stop sign without looking while we were in the crosswalk at Octavia and Hayes ... the dog and I were five feet away. I yelled and she stopped and then gave me a little dismissive flip of the hand. Driving some obscene SUV. It's always somebody else's fault nowadays ... the little shit.

But that was nothing compared to an architectural desecration at Buchanan and Grove, a few blocks away. There is a magnificent old brick building there with a faded tile sign that says "Hebrew Free Loan Association" and a cornerstone that says 1925. This part of town is the Western Addition, and for many decades, especially after the Second World War, it was a relatively poor and very multi-ethnic neighborhood. In the late 40s and early 50s, it was largely razed and turned into ugly subsidized housing, and much of it remains an architectural scar ... opposite the building in question on both Buchanan and Grove are subsidized housing units, albeit in pretty good shape and well-maintained, but nothing compared to the fabulous Victorians that were destroyed in the 50s.

The Hebrew Free Loan Association building had long seemed empty, but in the last year or so several signs in Korean sprouted, and there is one rather weather-beaten metal sign that says "Korean American Residents Association of San Francisco Bay Area."

All well and fine, except ... today they started to paint the ancient bricks a hideous cheap yellow ... and a crappy amateurish paint job to boot. These magnificent bricks have never been painted before. They have already painted over the inlaid "Hebrew Free Loan Association" logo. Do they plan to rip out the iron grates with the stars of David? It is a brutal, bloody-minded assault on San Francisco's architectural heritage, and an assault on historical memory. What are they thinking?

The only organization with online contact information in this location that I can find is the Korean American Women Artists & Writers Association. It is possible that the organization is actually called the Korean American Community Center of San Francisco and Bay Area, but it has no readly accessible online presence. Whoever it is has committed a crime against art. It is bizarre that this is an Asian organization considering the recent, stirring world premiere of After The War by Philip Kan Gotanda (pdf) at San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater which treated of the multi-ethnic community and its destruction in the 50s ... now some short-sighted organization does more damage. Shame on them.

I have sent some notes to sundry parties and will post any results here. If this building has already been declared worthy of historical preservation, whoever mucked it up will have some expensive restoration to do.

I have photographed the building numerous times ... it is a difficult subject because it is dark, close to the street and shrouded by trees, so I have mostly shot details. I mounted a folder of photos before the desecration here or just click on the photo. I think I have more photos but I'll have to hunt them down and will post them if I find them.

Rufus baby

Frankly, I read the Salon piece on Rufus Wainwright only because his pic on the home page was so alluring. But his remark caught me:

I'm definitely a fan of juxtaposition ... using the most beautiful line to say the most horrific thing -- I think one of the main things in songwriting is definitely friction between the words and the melody. It's got to be done very delicately because both elements are somewhat explosive, and all of a sudden the song becomes like a crystal meth lab. You know, you don't want to blow up your family.

I'm only dropping this here as a placeholder because juxtaposition was a major idea in my dissertation. I used the phrase "juxtaposition and reversal." I am frankly not really up to writing about it right now as I lounge through a good start by the Giants young tuffie Matt Cain ... and that is a classic tuf baseball name ... but I will come back to juxtaposition some time soon. Meanwhile I get to mount that sexy photo.

Wolfie redux

Fine piece in Salon about Wolfowitz by Sidney Blumenthal. My friend JG says I was too soft on Wolfie ... I claimed I was balanced ... but Blumenthal's piece is pretty damning. He talks about Wolfowitz's penchant for the simple idea:

Wolfowitz's vision promised nothing less than a rupture with the entire world order. By one decisive act of will, all that existed -- all -- would be transformed. After a brief, very brief, interval, collective happiness and universal harmony would be ushered in. With shock and awe, change would roll in mighty waves, pounding all with its unceasing force.

The rest of the piece is so detailed and intellectual that it makes me want to buy a bottle of Gravol and read Blumenthal's How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime.

The Trinity and the Emperor

Theology is bunk, but religious history is endlessly fascinating. With that in mind, as I was padding around Paris a year ago, I had to admit that my background in the history of christianity was rather weak despite an extensive academic background in islamic history. And so I set into a year of reading on the middle ages and the history of the religion that rules our world. That is the background of this and future similar posts.

Thesis: the notion of the trinity was propagated by a pagan emperor for political purposes and visited upon a fractious bunch of mostly Greek christians most of whom disagreed, fought the decsion, but had little recourse in the long run.

Christians, broadly speaking, know little about the origins of their religion and know even less about its early history. There are several salient myths that we all know: the huddled downtrodden living in the catacombs, the noble martyrs fed to the lions, and then there is the miraculous conversion of Constantine on the eve of the battle of Milvian Bridge. Alas, either not true or so attenuated as to be in essence not true.

The real truth of early Christianity is that it was profoundly eastern empire in nature, predominantly Greek, overwhelmingly urban, and concentrated among the middle and upper classes. The repressions were sporadic, brutal when they occurred. The empire was primarily concerned not so much to supress christians, but to force them to sacrifice to the particular Roman gods associated with imperial rule. For every poor sod sacrificed in some colisseum, tens of thousand lived their lives quietly and in peace ... sort of like gay people before gay liberation, if you think about it ... official scorn and legal jeopardy, periodic savage repression, unpredictable episodes of violence and death in a large community who mostly led successful lives and whose acquaintances knew exactly what was going on.

Nice image ... early christians as the faggots of their era.

But the myth I am concerned about here is the myth of the battle of Milvian Bridge in 312. It is pretty clear that Constantine did not personally convert before the battle in which by besting Maxentius he became the Augustus of the western Roman empire. There is some evidence that his troops may have had the chi-ro, or labarum, on their shields. There is, of course, no evidence that any supreme beings intervened in the skirmish.

Constantine issued the Edict of Milan the next year in which he granted tolerance not only to christianity but to all religions not previously tolerated in the empire, although Jews did not do as well as christians. Polytheistic religions whose members were willing to sacrifice to the Roman gods had always been tolerated. It was, to put it succinctly, the intolerant religions that were not tolerated because they eschewed the empire. More on christianity and empire below. But the evidence on the Edict of Milan points not to a Saul/Paul-type conversion, but rather to a savvy emperior whose prescience about the state of the empire and its future led him to understand that the existing politico-religious system was untenable or at least useless to him.

It took another dozen years of warring for Constantine to become sole emperor, and it was at this point that his understanding, I would argue, of the value of christianity for his place in history matured. He came to understand the future of the empire was Greek and eastern, and history proved him right for only in 1453 did his creation slip beneath the waves. He founded Constantinople and he set out to harness christianity by calling the Council of Nicaea in 325. He presided there on a golden throne, and it was there that he picked the trinity as orthodoxy notwithstanding that the arians almost certainly vastly outnumbered the trinitarians both at the council and in Greek society.

Why did he do it? I think, following the argument of Charles Freemen in The Closing of the Western Mind that he saw, whether explicitly or intuitively, that a trinity of divinities removed the figure of Christ from an ability to sponsor anti-imperial rebellion. Jesus' life, as depicted in the gospels written decades after his life by men who never met him, was one of a rebel against authority; now, in the service of empire a mere decade after that empire had legalized the religion invented in his name, he had to be subsumed into an unapproachable godhead so that his role in religion could become the psychologistic one of providing salvation for the compliant rather than the sociological one of providing means of liberation to the oppressed. The arian approach that Jesus was less than god, a human being taken to god, was just a little too real. What empire wants, as it had with its focus on sacrifice to its ancient gods before Milan, is a godhead that it controls and before which individuals are beseechers, meek and controllable.

Arianism lived on in the east for centuries, and it was the preferred religion of various barbarian horsemen probably more because they sought to differentiate themselves from the Romans they ruled than anything else.

It is remarkable the speed with which christianity turned into its opposite once it had been subsumed and adopted by empire. Things bite back, and the religion that proclaimed itself as the religion of the oppressed became the oppressor with a speed that must have been dizzying.

Nevertheless, those myths of martyrdom and conversion hung around. The present-day christian talk about a personal relationship with Jesus has a bit of an odor of arianism to me. Regardless, such thinking requires some supporting myths, and the greater context of a religion whose worldwide success arose from a deal with empire is not enough. So with a wink and a nod, just as it has been in one way or another for two millennia, the churches propagate myths that they do not believe or which undermine their claims. But then, theology is nothing if it is not contradictory.

Meanwhile, old Constantine finally died, converting only on his deathbed. He had succeeded in yoking christianity to his empire. That yoke remained in place in the eastern church thereafter; the western church had a long struggle with rulership ahead of it which relates to the role of the barbarian horsemen. But Constantine's big moment in Nicaea nevertheless became an orthodoxy for which countless more christians would perish than the few who provided a meal for Roman lions.

Image of Constantine by Markus Bernet (July 10, 2004) courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

administrivia

Been a blast writing this blog, and I'm only on my 10th day. But it raises issues that I didn't expect, and I think it worth addressing these from time to time.

So the first such issue is this: the name is Arod, rhymes with Herrod, nothing to do with A-Rod who came along decades after I was Arod. It was the given name of my paternal grandfather's whom I adored and who died when I was 10, and it is a name that is liberally sprinkled around in my family. It occurs in the Bible, Numbers 26:17. No idea of where it came from in the family. It is my middle name, and it has been my Internet handle since I first had an email account in 1994. My friends, however, call me Stephen.

A couple of issues relate to identity and identifying. Anyone who chose to do so could identify me by name pretty quickly, and I am not really trying to hide it. But I would rather keep my identity a little fuzzy on the blog itself, at least for now, and require that extra step or two of anyone who wants to have the actual moniker. Why? See below.

I have also chosen to identify my friends, acquaintances, and family rather obliquely by using initials that may or may not correspond to their actual names unless any of them tell me explicitly that they prefer that I identify them or, perhaps, link to their Internet presence. And I am going to identify the place where I work as a Major Research University or MRU. Again, you can find out where I actually work in about 3 or more clicks, but if you have to know it by name you will have to do that work.

Why? This blog is about my intellectual and ideational ramblings born of a lifetime of study, both formal and informal, but always passionate and involved. It is not about the specificity of identity either of me or where I am now or of whom I know or have known. The Internet paradoxically allows us simultaneously to be more identifiable and less unique. So if there is anything unique here, it is not in the naming of an identity but rather in what I might say and, more importantly, who out there is touched by it, whether that be a couple of friends or a self-selected cross-section of folks whose take on ideas and thinking bears come congruity with mine. I am not concerned about who or how many look at this, but I want whoever does look at it to do so because of some part of what I write, not some part of any specificity which I can identify or which they can identify.

I am a little suspicious of identity, anyway. You see, incongruity, ambivalence, and looking at the edges are features of where I came from, where I am, and where I am getting to. So the approach mirrors this.

I remember an anecdote about Stephen King who said, in response to the news that he has macular degeneration, that it was okay with him because he always looked at things out of the corner of his eye anyway. I like to look at things square on, but I prefer to turn my gaze not to the center but to the boundaries between things. And boundaries are usually fuzzy, not hard.

So, if this is a pile of steaming crap to you, then you will probably gag at my ramblings. If not, check me out.

Lincecum and Oswalt

I always wanted to blog a game, so this was little experiment ... but the end result was way too long. If you want to read the whole thing, click here.

Tonight's Giants game features a matchup of similar pitchers, rookie Giant Tim Lincecum and veteran Astro Roy Oswalt, both of whom are dominating little guys who slingshot the ball with ferocity and accuracy. Both have hard fastballs and big breaking balls. I think they each have a changeup and Oswalt has a sinker. We didn’t see a lot of Lincecum’s change-up in his last start, but he sprinkled it in tonight to good effect.

The game did not disappoint. Lots of late movement, pitches on the black, futile swings and frozen stares as the ball bloew right by.

Eerie how similar Lincecum and Oswalt's motions are. Lincecum says he modeled himself on Oswalt, so it is odd that they face each other in back to back starts in the earliest stages of Lincecum's career.

I think that the umpires are squeezing the strike zone this year. Oswalt didn't get an inside fastball early on. I like a big strike zone ... swing the bat, boyz.

Oswalt has a weird waddle when he walks, like his muscles are too tight. When he throws, it is that same sling shot motion as Lincecum ... as if the little guy has to get the whole musculature into the throw in lieu of the muscle or the weight of the big boy pitchers. I like little guy pitchers ... and I like the big ones too ... I just plain root for pitching.

Lincecum was victimized by two hard hits down the respective baselines in the 4th; he gave up two runs but stuck with it and looked strong the rest of the night. Lincecum is cool ... got victimized by some bad luck, but stuck it out. Still throwing hard, and cool as a cucumber.

Oswalt paid for walking Bonds in the 7th. The Giants scored thrice and that was the game except for ...

Benitez is up ... hold yer breath ... Carlos Lee smashes the ball to the deepest part of Death Valley (right center) for a fly out ... a home run anywhere else in the world. But Feliz gets the third out with his stylish hard throw across the diamond.

Sweet. Giants win 4-2.

Huzzah! The Witch is Dead!

Mark Morford of the SF Chronicle reports that the Hummer H3 will soon be toast. Read the article ... scathing.